DVD technology is well known in the prior art. The DVD specification allows for single or dual-layered DVDs, and single-sided or double-sided DVDs. A single sided, dual layer DVD holds almost 8.5 Gigabytes, or about 8 hours of quality video and multi-channel soundtrack.
DVDs compress video information using MPEG-2 (Motion Pictures Experts Group), to minimize the amount of data required for video. The specification allows for up to 480 horizontal lines of resolution. This results in picture quality virtually free of video noise with a high level of detail and color fidelity.
When a computer or set-top box is used to display movies from a DVD, the DVD data process over the PCI bus in the computer or set-top box. After the DVD data is read over the PCI bus from a DVD source, it is the decrypted by the CPU. The CPU then re-encrypts the data for transmission over the PCI bus to an MPEG-2 decoder.
Because of the large amount of data involved in DVD, it places great demands on the computer of set-top box in terms of processing time. Therefore, there is a need in the prior art for a more efficient method of processing DVD data that also reduces the number of required computations by the computer or set-top box.